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I'm just a guy who grew up in DC saw a lot of things.

I wanted to make a difference.

I wanted to do better.

I wanted to help families.

I know how I feel to be out there, you know, searching for your loved one.

It's heartbreaking, especially when the little girls go missing and daddy looking for him, and you know, mama looking for him, and you know, they feel like the police ain't doing nothing.

You know what are y'all doing?

Because they don't see anything.

It's heartbreaking.

The homicide detectives termed the cases the little Girl case.

This child was laying on the side of the road.

I wouldn't go no way.

I would call my house.

Those first five murders should have been a huge warning bell for the police.

We just want to know what happened.

This person must have saw that.

They were thinking that maybe it's just one person, and he says, they need to know.

This is me.

I thought that they would catch him.

I thought it was just a matter of time.

I'm Celeste Headley and this is Freeway Phantom.

In the early stages of our Freeway Phantom investigation, we consulted Henderson, long of DC's Missing Voice.

Henderson helped us understand the systemic and regional issues that affected the Freeway fantas investigations in the nineteen seventies and current cases of missing and murdered children.

The foundation never changes with any kind of investigative work through roots of it and.

What it's about, the core stuff.

Never it's still it'll never changed.

As a DC native with deep roots in the community and years spent building relationships, Henderson is an invaluable source of support and expertise for the families who are searching for answers or coping with loss.

For this bonus episode, we dig into his story to learn more about what led him to the work he does today and the hard fought battle for change in DC's justice system.

Basically, what I do is I work right alongside with the lead detective that's working to find a missing person here in DC.

I'm actually going behind him or sometimes ahead of him to interview witnesses.

Is to do self owned traces, to do surveillance, to take singer friends and DNA and all this kind of stuff to make sure it's submitted.

It's very rewarding.

Whatever the case may be, whatever we're looking for, that's our number one objective is to stay on that track to look for missing people.

So what I'm learning about investigating cases, you have to have a certain character to do this work because it can be very frustrating.

You have to kiss a little bit of behind sometime to get the information you want.

Henderson's nonprofit works on missing persons cases in Washington, DC, and he often acts as a liaison between the Metropolitan Police and black communities.

The work is hard.

It's taken years of emotional and physical labor to establish the trust Henderson now enjoys.

But this work is personal.

It's directly connected to his upbringing in DC and tragedies within his family.

I was born in nineteen sixty eight open Southeast Washington, d C.

The Warding sector of Washington, d C.

We all lived in a like a little one bedroom apartment with my grandmother, my mother's mother, and my father got a good job and we moved over to ward Fire, which is another northeast sector of DC, and that's where I grew up.

My father still lives in the same house.

As a kid, I grew up in the crack era of d C.

I grew up here where crackhead came into our communities in the eighties and the.

Late seventies is when it was starting.

So as a kid, I got a chance to kind of see all that at a low level, you know, just from my eyes seeing it.

I never was involved in it, never got involved with nothing like that as far as no homicide or nothing, but I saw it.

I saw my friends get involved growing up.

I saw a lot of my friends who are dead now or most of them are in car.

I just saw a lot of death here in DC.

I'll be quite frankly, quite honest with if you was a lot of violence here in DC trying to control the drug trade.

Everybody wanted to get a piece of it, and as a result, we saw a rise in homicides.

As a kid growing up, I got a chance to lose loved ones.

I'm probably a seven time loser.

I've lost seven or eight people to homicide.

And when I tell you I seen violence, I saw it with my own eyes.

I lost my kid, my oldest son.

His mother was murdered by a fifteen year old back in nineteen ninety two, ninety three.

I know about death's firsthand and violent crimes.

I know how I feel for the community to have information on your homicide, but won't nobody come forward.

So as a person, this kind of motivated me to do the work I'm doing.

And also being in the military.

Growing up surrounded by violence, and Henderson wasn't always sure he would make it out.

He thanks his father for emphasizing the importance of structure and discipline.

He was tough.

My father was really tough, and he laid the law down in the house.

Immediately after high school, after graduating, you know, my father told me I had to get out.

I had to either go to work or I had to go to school.

And I didn't really want to go to college.

So I went to the military and I did about seven years, and I came back home I got a chance to work with different people and meet different people and see the goodness in people, because most people are good people, you know.

For the most part, my main aspect of my story was the core was my father and my grandmother.

They were at the core of me growing up because you know, sometimes you need a man to tell a man how to be a man, and so my father was probably the biggest example that I had growing up and the reason why I was able to make the decisions that I made.

Henderson decided he wanted to be that kind of example for his community too.

He eventually established DC's Missing Voice with a focus on finding missing and exploited persons, another issue that hits painfully close to home.

In nineteen ninety nine, his aunt Aileen went missing.

My aunt was last seeing September fifteenth, nineteen ninety nine.

Family couldn't reach her, you know, they kept calling her and calling her and calling her with no answer.

So we called.

We got the rental office to do a wellness check, and when we got to the apartment, my little cousin was there in the apartment alone, Drone and his baby Sea because he was a baby at the time and he was strapped in.

He had been there for a couple of hours, and you know, my family knew something was wrong.

We called the police, and the police got involved to no avail, researched her, search and search, and at the time, we weren't where we are now with missing persons.

In nineteen ninety nine, we didn't have social media like we have social media now.

We didn't have some of the tools we have now.

My family was they just thought that the police was gonna take care of it.

The police know, the police got you to allow on.

The police come to find out a lot of things probably could have been done better by the police department.

They never asked them for DNA, never asked.

All this time, my family told me, look, don't talk about this no more.

We're not getting no answers.

Just don't talk about it.

It was just so painful.

When Aileen went missing in the nineties, the federally funded databased National Missing and Unidentified Person System or NEMUS had not yet been established, and the Combined DNA Index System or CODIS was brand new.

Henderson uses both systems in his work today.

He said that had they been available earlier on, it could have saved his family years of pain and uncertainty.

We had three unidentified remains found here in DC, and we just knew one of them probably was a Leen because it was in the same street that she would frequent I told my family, you know, we got to get our DNA and if we're going to have approve that that's her and get some kind of closure.

Well, in the process when we put our DNA in, we got a hit on a body that was found in two thousand, So she had been in the Moore from two thousand to twenty and nineteen before she was identified.

Now we tell you about good detective work.

My detective took a shot in the dark.

He had some remains up there at the Maryland Cortner's office.

They kind of fit the same description height of her.

He asked them test those bones.

Went and test the bones.

It turned up a snake.

It was her.

So my family went through a lot of hearted because we didn't know about all the different technology that was available and what we should be using to solve her case.

And they quite frankly didn't want to talk about it.

They didn't even want This woe was so deep and so painful.

It was still wide open, but we just ignored it.

We still wanted answers.

We still we was the more desperate for the answers.

So they had to go ahead and they went on and they put their DNA in.

They got a match, and then we convinced the sun drone to put his in and that was a real match.

Then they were positive that it was her, and that's how we got the answers.

Even though Henderson found an answer to his ant's mystery, his personal tragedies didn't end there.

His niece went missing around twenty twelve, and at that point Henderson was fed up with the cycle of searching and waiting for answers.

He decided to get involved with the investigation.

I had a niece twelve years old.

She kept running away from home, and you know, the police were working on it, and you know, they got eighty million kids that's missing.

So I was out there on the ground talking with dope dealers.

What was going through my head was that this is what the police go through, and they probably go through it worse than what I'm saying.

She was missing off and on, I say, about three or four years.

She's twenty one now.

She got four kids.

But the trauma that she went through, the domestic violence, you know, leaving names out, the domestic violence and all that stuff that she went through.

You know, did they suffer?

They suffer?

It changed.

After this his mission was clear.

Looking for her.

Is what got me involved in is I saw how hard it was for investigators to acquire and get information, to get information that they need to solve these cases.

And it really drove me to do more and to want to do more to assist them.

So I realized I had to learn more about the logistics of investigating cases, and I had to know.

You got to know what you're doing because sometimes you really can mess up a case unintentionally.

So I had to learn.

I had to I had to ask a lot of questions from to on law enforcement officers that are investigators and sit down with them talk with them.

I had to do my own study, and I had to go through various courses to learn how.

To do this in a professional man and not just as a citizen.

Henderson began working part time as a Trace investigator.

He now offers his services to families at no cost.

You don't want any money.

This is all pro bona work I did, and all the materials and stuff.

Some of the stuff is from the police department, some of us from But you do all this out of your own pocket, because you know what it's like.

I don't really want to work by contract because I don't want to charge no family to look for a missing person.

Unless they're rich, they can pay.

But nobody's test driving me.

I'm doing this without funding.

Part of his work includes running platforms to publicize cases in DC.

Platforms are important when they come to missing people.

I have DC's Missing Boys and Missing expl the East of the River Missing ex for the East of the River gives focus to East of the River residents where they can just focus on they missing people because they hit me up when they told me, look, we getting tired of here about all these missing people.

It's happened all over here when we got the highest number of missing people east of the River.

So I created that page to get more eyes on the street in that area.

The more eyes you have, the more you can get that call.

Then now DC's missing voice is all of the missing people in DC.

When you talk about an investigative tool, we're in the modern world now in this Internet is something It can be very powerful when you're doing these public inquiries.

When you're asking the public, the Metropolitan Police Department is seeking the public's assistance locating so and so, so and so.

Eighty million people may see that.

So that's now a public inquiry and we get a lot of chips.

We have a lot of chips that we follow up on.

That's why we have them.

For the main reason, that's to promote and to publicize and to give MPD a greater reach in terms of audience to their missing people in Washington DC.

As we've talked about throughout the season, an investigation has many moving parts.

It's complicated and constantly moving, like a clockwork mechanism.

Details can get lost or overlooked.

Henderson wanted to get the best training he could to make sure he was on top of his game.

A god named that name is Palmer and Great Britain created a professional course for regular people to go through to learn how to operate within the private sector to do trace investigation.

All the necessary paperwork that you need to fill out.

Like if you're my client, I need to know what paperwork to fill out, because that's what separate the regular citizen from the private professional investigator.

He has documentation meaning he has an intake for him, he has a contract, he knows all the lead considerations when he's doing surveillance, so he doesn't violate anybody's constitutional rights.

If you out to investigating the case, and let's just say it's a case that this criminal malice involved, if you know the aspects of the law, you can protect that data from being disqualified and thrown out.

If you know what you're doing.

You know, so certain things you have to know in terms of the legal considerations.

And these are just some of the things you learn.

How to promptly interview people, what questions to ask, you know, the theory behind an interview, for example, when you go into before you even go in the door, you got to have an objective.

You got if you want a confession, if you want to just build some rapport with him and hit him up back up later again.

Knowing all this before.

You go in, it's a part of your preparation to be an investigator.

You know, there's certain principles that we operate off of.

You know, before we go in, we've tried to learn all these different things before we go and start formally interviewing people.

Much of Henderson's work as a trace investigator involves gathering information and he's had to hone his skills in interviewing and note taking, even organizing data.

You can't just jump out and these are some of the things you learn when you go through this certification.

How to document your paperwork.

You know, how to make sure it's in order, how to write up a report to submit the law enforcement.

What's the fabric of it would that sworn officer need to have?

What is he looking for?

You're supposed to know the basic stuff so there's something useful when it comes in.

You learn all this going through this certification, and it's an international certification, meaning all the trades investigators got together and they started compowering methods and stuff like that.

For the guy who may not be working in law enforcementer who may want to go into the private sector.

He can understand how to do it and they can't with a manual.

You know, you have online tutoring, you can call it, you can ask questions.

Your gold mine when you're any investigator, it's staying in contact with senior investigators.

I've learned that you want to call them, you want to say hey, I got this, and they usually not going to give you the answer, but they'll point you in the right direction.

They'll help you.

They've been there before, they've already done it.

Your case ain't the first case under the sun.

He got into this work because of his passion for service and its emotional work.

But after a decade of experience, there's also a familiar pattern.

To the job.

Well, I might get off from work, i might get a call and I might go in through a general intake with a family.

It may be over the internet, it might be over the phone.

They'll throw me some known location with the person frequent We'll go there with set surveillance because we're all creatures, are habit and we may head out.

I might do some reverse phone checks.

They may be getting calls from their loved one from a given number, and they may want me to find out what's the location, where are they at?

So we'll go and try to figure out where they are.

We'll use social media to look at the background or where they took a picture at, and we'll try to figure out where they are, where they may be hanging out at a lot of my work involves surveillance.

Because you got the lead detective to sworn law enforce an officer.

He's lived doing the heavy lifting in the office.

I might go out there day to day and I might just be sitting at a location and our positivity ID to missing person.

They never see me or know anything about I'm there.

I call nine one one MPD Patrol Services, come contact the missing person, bring them back in if they're under eighteen.

If they're over eighteen, they'll notify the family and missing person has been located.

So a lot of it is surveillance and and light investigating work.

Henderson took us on a ride along through his patrol routine.

My producer Jamie and I sat in his suv as Henderson drove around the neighborhoods doing standard surveillance.

So we're just gonna ride there and you know, you guys can take a look.

This is every day what you're gonna see every single day, sun up the sundown.

This is what's going on in the community, and it's perpetuating.

Our most severe cases.

Are, Henderson long says, the tasks and become routine, but every case is different.

There are abductions like the case of Relitia Rudd, an eight year old girl who went missing in twenty fourteen and runaways like Henderson's niece.

On our ride along, he talked about other cases he's worked on.

Right now, we at nineteenth and Benning Road.

Between nineteenth and Benning Road and fifteenth and Benning Road, it's kind of like an area where we have a lot of missing persons that we find In this area, there's a lot of drugs, a lot of heroin.

I don't know whether you guys know about K two and PCP.

K two is a drug that's killing.

A lot of people.

When I know you might know about PCP, it makes you hallucinate, and so it's a lot of the usage of that drug here and that's prompting some of the missing person's cases.

It's prompting some of the violence assaults because sometimes they think things are happening that are not happening because they're hallucinating.

Just the fact that they're out here unsupervised.

It's a big can of worms.

You never know, snake eyes.

It could turn up snake eyes and we find a young person either in jail or dead.

I had another missing person's case, Dominique Franklin.

He was murdered, he was missing, and he was located.

He went before the judge and judged gave him some orders to do something.

He said, screw the judge and screw everybody and walked off.

And the day later he was found dead, shot in the head.

He left on his own.

Nobody targeted him, but in the end he still wound up losing and he was sixteen.

So Dominique Franklin is another.

Case that I kind of worked in the end of it, the last part of it.

I kind of got involved with it a little bit.

But missing persons can lead to anything.

It could turn up them getting arrested for something for the rest of their life, or them loosing their life or taking somebody else's life.

The discrepancy between the number of cases and the resources available to solve them mean many slip through the cracks.

In episode ten, we talked about Relasia Rudd.

She was missing for weeks before her case received any media attention, and she has still not been found.

Henderson says publicity can bring children home safely.

Keeping the cases out there and the public's eye educating them about it.

That's what really expired, and put the pressure on the police to do something them.

Families have to pressure.

The police, you know, they have to continue to press the police and anybody who can help publicize their case.

That's what keep your case alive.

I mean, you know, that's what keep these cases alive.

That's why we the way we all with relaship uds because we don't want the community to go to sleep on people will forget about the start them.

You don't say nothing, and you don't keep making noise about it, they'll forget.

They will forget.

There's a big question that hangs over Henderson's work.

What issues in the community are contributing to the more than two thousand cases of missing children each year in DC?

Why do so many cases slip through the cracks, and how can we begin to solve the socioeconomic issues at play.

You do have people who've become victim of their circumstance, whatever's around them.

That there's drugs, if it was domestic violence in the home, if it was poverty in general, because poverty is our motivating factor here when we start talking about these issues.

The Mayor of Washington, DC formed a task force that we was examining and we started looking at missing persons and we started looking at solutions, and we couldn't find it.

Cookie cutter one fits all because we've realized, Man, you talking about a great, big social issue.

The family structure is the number one pre person and what drives that generational wealth gaps shoot domestic violence in the home.

Maybe the new boyfriend is touching the daughter, or maybe the new boyfriend is hitting the mother, or maybe it's lack of affordable houses.

We got eighty people living in one home.

Somebody going out of there and use as the kids.

It's a lot of stress, you know.

We don't have a lot of hardcore solutions and real outreach in terms of services for mental health.

You know.

So you see crazy cases you get out of here, like Militia Rudd, and you start wondering, how could the mama do this?

Not when you look at the family.

Henderson says, sometimes kids run away from home because something drives them away, domestic violence, drug use.

Sometimes they're lured away by predators like the freeway phantom.

But he says, no matter the reason why they left home, all missing persons cases need to be treated with the same level of seriousness.

Sometimes it's a lot of coercion, you know.

Sometimes it's a lot of dynamics within the person walking out the door on their own, Just because they left on their own.

I got another case for you.

Jolie Musa from Virginia voluntarily walked out of her home to go meet a young man and never return.

Now, just because she voluntarily left, we don't need to down play her case and think that she's a runaway, see because at that point, when you do that, a lot of the action that's supposed to be taken isn't taken.

Now, have we started looking for her sooner?

Could we have found her alive and maybe saved her.

We'll never know.

Begins at home.

It's staying in touch with our communities.

When someone goes missing, especially a child, is chaos.

You don't know how to put your left shoe on from the right.

Y're some things you think you will remember, you won't remember.

We should know our patterns, our loved ones patterns.

We should check up on them.

You know, we shouldn't be so distant.

And you know the technology now on the phones and everybody email, and you know you got to give people a call and see, you know, just how they're doing.

I got the older sister and you know, she called me and let me know she home, you know, and stuff like that.

So we got to check on each other.

We have to take care of each other.

In the communities and our families.

This is important because you we have some cases where the missing person wasn't reported missing for oh they were last seeing one year ago, by the families being so estranged times of the essence and the missing person's case, getting that report in and getting the investigation going early to trace going.

When we attended one of Henderson's community outreach events in Southeast DC, he laid out the Metropolitan Police Department's five steps to prepare you in the event your loved one goes missing.

The biggest problem with having in the District of Columbia they not being reported in a timely manner.

So much time elapsed.

The case of Karan Jones, it was two days the dumpster was gone on to China.

So that, I mean, that's the first step, is just reporting them.

In episode nine, we mentioned the case of Kayon Jones, a two month old whose mother confessed that she rolled over on Chaon and he stopped breathing.

She later placed his body in a dumpster.

Kayon's remains were sadly never recovered.

What we're trying to do is trying to get people to understand, call for help, call the police, because seeing after the medical examiner it came out and examined his body and realized there was no trauma to the body.

Everything jobs that we had just been an accident, but by him being thrown into a dumpster and they never been able to find him to do any kind of examination or determine anything with any kind of medical certainty.

It just looks suspicious.

And then you give us eighty ninety different stories and we don't know what to believe.

And then you know, you throw a little bit of substance abuse in there, and you know, the social things, and then you got yeah, man, you got some stuff.

As for Henderson's future in this line of work, he told us he's looking to transition into doing it full time.

Well, I always had a vision that that DC would lead the country and take the leadership role on missing persons.

That it should.

We're going to continue to work and work and work and never be complacent about missing person and what more we can do to.

Locate missing persons quickly?

You know we can We can never rest, you can never rest on this stuff.

There's never a situation of complacency.

The more you go through it, you learn because every case, every single case got a different twist in it, which requires certain level of readiness.

So talking about all these different things and implementing all these different tools that we can use.

It's so much work to be done.

But I'm hoping that DC will continue on.

I'm gonna keep pushing legislators to get legislation.

Going back to initial investigations, obstruction, lying to investigators, I think that there should be a penalty for that if we find out your line or you don't provide correct information, And in Washington, DC, there's really no penalty for that.

In Maryland, if.

Your child is missing and they under the age of eighteen or thirteen, you better be.

Reporting and within twenty four hours if.

They investigate and they find out you knew and as a result of your negligence, the child suffers trauma cal on the felony.

And here in DC they don't have that.

So we hope in DC will step it up legislatively.

Were hoping they'll step it up from a law enforcement perspective, and definitely the community.

Community is huge, way bigger than law enforcement.

Get the community involved and active in the use of the technology and the tools and stuff.

Are we cooking with gas then that's what I'm hoping.

We want to give special thanks to Henderson Long for all his work on the Freeway Phantom case and his support of this podcast.

He's been instrumental in helping us tell the story of these young girls, both from the nineteen seventies and today.

Henderson's work in the community is vital.

His organization, DC's Missing Voice, is an official five oh one C three nonprofit.

If you want to support the work he does, reach out at Henderson dot Long twenty two at iCloud dot com, or you can find the DC's Missing Voice Facebook page and stay up to date on current missing persons cases.

Freeway Fantom is a production of iHeartRadio, Tenderfoot TV, and Black Bar MITZVAH.

Our host is Celese Hidley.

This episode was written and produced by no Amy Griffin.

The show is written by Trevor Young, Jamie Albright, and Celese Hidley.

Executive producers on Behalf of Ourheart Radio include Matt Frederick and Alex Williams, with supervising producer Trevor Young.

Executive producers on Behalf of Tenderfoot TV include Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay, with producers Jamie Albright and Tracy Kaplan.

Executive producers on behalf of Black bar Mitzvah include myself, j Ellis and Aaron Bergman with producer Sidney Foos.

Lead researcher is Jamie Albright.

Artwork by Mister Soul two one six, original music by Makeup and Vanity Set Special thanks to a team at Uta Beck Media and Marketing and the Nord Group Tender for TV and iHeartMedia, as well as Black Bar Mitzvah have increased the reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for their Freeway Fan of murders.

The previous reward of up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars offered by the Metropolitan Police Department has been matched.

A new total reward of up to three hundred thousand dollars is now being offered.

If you have any information relating to these unsolved crimes, contact the Metropolitan Police Department at area code two zero two seven two seven nine zero ninety nine.

For more information, Please visit freewayanom dot com for more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV.

Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Thanks for listening.